Case study: Advertising Analytics

Turn – Digital Hub

Challenge

With the largest ad-tech Hadoop cluster in the world, Turn needed expert help upgrading its Hadoop distribution from one major release to another to ensure the transition went smoothly. The organization also needed additional assistance managing and operating the cluster at scale.

Solution

Cloudwick provided professional and managed services, sending in Hadoop expert resources, conducting the upgrade and providing quality assurance to ensure the cluster was performance tuned and running smoothly.

Benefits

By working with Cloudwick, Turn had dedicated big data experts to support the Hadoop distribution upgrade for one of the biggest clusters in the world. Cloudwick leveraged its enterprise production experience at scale to meet Turn’s high availability business requirements throughout the upgrade. In addition, Cloudwick specialists remained on-site for continued development and support, providing the company with enhanced efficiency, productivity and effectiveness.

Immense Cluster of Analytics for Ad-Tech

Turn, the digital hub for marketers, was founded in 2006. Turn enables anonymous audience planning, data centralization, cross-device advertising, and advanced analytics, along with point-and-click access to more than 150 integrated technology partners. The company works with more than 5,000 worldwide advertisers, including Accuen, American Express, AMNET, Dentsu, DirecTV, eBay, Experian, HP, Kia, Kraft, L’Oreal USA, Progressive Insurance, Sky Italia, StubHub, Thomas Cook, and Zales.

Before running analytics on clients’ advertising effectiveness, the company stores its data – clicks and impressions visitors register on those ads – on Hadoop; 35 petabytes of HDFS over 850 nodes across two clusters. As a matter of fact, its cluster is among the top 1% of global clusters in the world in terms of storage and capacity. Very few companies have this level of storage.

Planning for Future Growth

Cloudwick sent in Hadoop expert resources, conducted the distribution upgrade, provided quality assurance and ensured the clusters were performance tuned to run smoothly. The clusters were tested with Turn’s applications, and Cloudwick remained on-site to provide continued support while the company searched for Hadoop resources to hire. “Hadoop is still relatively new to the market, so there’s a huge discrepancy in supply and demand and it’s challenging to get the right people in a short amount of time,” said Ramaiah. “We have one of the largest Hadoop clusters in the world and Cloudwick brings the level of expertise we needed for such an environment.”

Customers rely on Turn to collect information on how campaigns are performing in order to make changes quickly and add value. Customers log into the Turn platform and run data on campaigns using a web-based console for drilling down to conduct data mining. According to Ramaiah, “It’s very important for our customers to see information at a granular level.”

Turn runs more than 20,000 jobs daily and the production cluster is also used for ETL, so it is mission critical to the company’s business. The company has maintained Cloudwick support to ensure optimal performance for this level of activity and for assistance in ongoing hardware changes to support the cluster growth over time.

Ready for the Future

In the future, Turn’s cluster is anticipated to grow to more than 50 petabytes and 1400 nodes, but before that could happen, the company needed to upgrade its Hadoop distribution from one major release to another, and required experienced big data assistance and expertise to ensure the transition went smoothly. It turned to Cloudwick for managed services after evaluating several other big data service providers.

“There aren’t many people with the skills demonstrated by the big data experts at Cloudwick,” said Kumar Ramaiah, Sr. Manager DataOps Infrastructure, Turn. “Cloudwick was also the one company with many consultants working in big data and I banked on this aggregate knowledge as well as the number of people the company had who are skilled in different areas of open source technology,”

The Bottom Line

By working with Cloudwick, Turn had dedicated big data experts to support the Hadoop distribution upgrade for one of the biggest clusters in the world. The company maintains Cloudwick Hadoop specialists on-site for continued development, support and training and appreciates the flexibility to move the consultant from one project to another. Overall, the company has enhanced efficiency, productivity and effectiveness with Cloudwick as its managed services provider.

“We have one of the largest Hadoop clusters in the world and Cloudwick brings the level of expertise we needed for such an environment.”

“There aren’t many people with the skills demonstrated by the big data experts at Cloudwick.”